"look, you're living in a difficult neighborhood, you're in a long-term struggle with difficult neighbors, and you don't have the ability to get everything you want in the way that you want. Such is life; get used to it. Because we're strong good guys who wish you well, we'll help defend you in major ways against major threats, particularly external ones. But beyond that, you make your bed and sleep in it. Don't expect us to support, underwrite, or coddle everything you do, especially those things that we believe make the situation worse rather than better."
Fair enough. I think the Israeli hawks would answer, it's a deal as long as you stop twisting our arm to force us to expose our necks to the enemy. Obviously, the hawkish position is not a particularly optimistic one. However, for now, Arafat's behavior has been so idiotic that he has driven the US to support Sharon in spite of its own wishes. I think the stalemate will hold until external events rewrite the equation, which may not take all that long as things stand.
Apropos of our discussion, I found this column by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. I followed him pretty well until the lame last paragraph, "Arafat needs to ... get himself and his people on the right side of the line". I think it's plain that Arafat is incapable of making this decision, and the Palestinians are equally incapable of saying "This guy is a loser, we need to go with the opposition leader" -- because of course, there is no opposition leader. So we all wait around for Arafat to die or circumstances to change.
__________________________________________________________
Why the Turn to Suicide?
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, February 5, 2002; Page A15
NEW YORK -- On my first visit to Israel, the government supplied me with a guide -- a former army officer and combat veteran renowned for his hawkish views. We disagreed about almost everything, including the nature of the "enemy." I found his views simplistic and repulsive. Recently, though, I have begun to wonder if he wasn't right.
This reassessment comes after months of suicide bombings, the most recent purportedly carried out by a woman. If in fact the death of 28-year-old Wafa Idriss was a suicide and not an accident in the course of a terrorist mission, then a kind of sexual frontier has been crossed. She would be the first female suicide bomber and, even more important, maybe the first of either sex not affiliated with some religiously oriented terrorist organization. She was not going to paradise. She was merely killing Jews.
Whatever the case, since the Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, about 90 suicide bombings have been attempted -- the vast majority of them successfully. When they started, I foolishly thought they would be self-limiting. The Palestinians, after all, were a famously secular Arab society. Religious zealotry was rare and not esteemed. It figured, therefore, that the pool of available suicide bombers was exceedingly shallow.
But that has not been the case. The probable reason is that years of Israeli occupation have changed the nature of Palestinian society, robbing it of both hope and, I would insist, rationality. It is now behaving as the Japanese did toward the end of World War II when, in desperation, they sent pilots crashing into U.S. ships. These kamikaze attacks were both effective and terrifying, but they were also a clear sign that Japan had gone nuts.
The kamikaze attacks were an important element in the dehumanizing of Japan. They encouraged, maybe the right word is "permitted," the use of the atomic bomb. After all, the enemy was not rational. It was barbaric. It would never surrender. It would fight to the last square inch. Better to incinerate them all.
In a similar manner, suicide bombings have transformed the image of Palestinians. Now, in the view of many, they are similar to the people my guide once so excoriated and insulted -- so different, so primitive, so cruel and indifferent to human life that they celebrate the suicide of a loved one and the simultaneous murder of innocent people. This is the awful legacy of Yasser Arafat's inaction and reluctance to condemn these attacks: He has vindicated the ugly views of my first Israeli guide.
In the lobby and meeting rooms of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel here, where the so-called Davos conference was held, I kept running into Israelis and Palestinians I have known for years. The Israelis were all dispirited. One of them described what it is like to hear the blast of some suicide bomber, hear the sirens, turn on the radio for the bulletin and then call family members to see if everyone's all right. For them, it's a bit of Sept. 11 every day.
As for the Palestinians, I can't help seeing them differently. It's not that they have changed; it's that I'm not sure anymore if they represent -- or even know -- their own society. They blame the Israeli occupation for the suicide bombings -- and surely they are right about that. The daily humiliation that an occupation represents, the interrogations at checkpoints, the loss of hope for this world and the promise that the next world will be better -- all this has taken a toll.
No doubt Palestinian society has been brutalized. (Idriss, the Palestinian bomber, was born in a refugee camp and raised in squalor.) No doubt, too, that it has been made to feel even more isolated and forlorn by the Bush administration's tendency to speak almost as one with Ariel Sharon. The Israeli leader has Arafat pinned in his compound at Ramallah, and that, clearly, is just fine with George Bush and most of his team. They have neatly divided the world into those who fight terrorism and those who don't, and the Palestinians find themselves on the wrong side of the line.
But what Arafat needs to do -- because it would be smart as well as right -- is get himself and his people on the right side of the line. He needs to condemn not just violence but suicide bombings in particular. He needs to reassert what were once Palestinian values and specifically rebuke families who exult in the death of their loved ones and the murder of innocents. Suicide bombers are not just killing themselves and others. They're killing the very humanity of their own people.
washingtonpost.com |
